Busted

Although I spend an inordinate amount of time feeling mild embarrassment for me just being me and saying and doing things that me does and says (which I will then, when alone, beat myself up mercilessly for) it's rare that I get that full cheek-blush burning red hot embarrassment that you imagine when people go 'oh my god it was soooo embarrassing!' Maybe because I live my life mired in a state of constant horror with just how socially gauche or gullible or clumsy I can be, my standards for what actually counts as 'embarrassing' are much more stringent than they are for other people who don't live in the constant state of mortification that plauges my everyday existence. So let me tell you that when I was embarrassed last night I can assure you I was actually embarrassed. Like, properly so. Like how you, as somewhat normally functioning members of society, might experience. There are only a few other times when I felt as embarrassed as I did last night so, to paint you a little word picture and put things into context, they are as follows;

1. The time I walked into school (secondary school no less!) with my skirt somehow tucked into my bag so that my knickers were on display. Yup.

2. The time I went for coffee with a boy I liked and when I came home I realised I had SEVERE coffee stains on my front teeth and must have had for the entire time I was talking to him. Interestingly, we never went for coffee again. (Well, not together at any rate. I am to assume he has drunk coffee since that encounter. If indeed he can bear to stomach the thought of imbibing delicious caffine-filled beverages without wanting to vomit at the thought of my dark brown stained hillbilly teeth.)

3. Pretty much any of the times I spoke to the Social Psychology lecturer that I had an intense crush on in university. In particular how I would try and shoehorn in as many liberal writer references as I could muster whenever I cornered him alone in a room. One week he included a Milan Kundera quote in one of his powerpoint slides which I took as a sure sign he wanted to fuck me as much as I wanted to fuck him given that I'd stand outside his classrooms holding books uncomfortably close to my face as nonchalantly as it is possible to hold a book that close to you when you are stood up and trying to hold your stomach in and keep your face relaxed and pretend to read words and be hyperaware of whether or not a man is looking at you without actually looking at him to ensure he could see the front cover and spine of said books and realise how intellectual, and therefore fuckable, I was - because reading words is a well known seduction technique, that's why all those self-help books and dating manuals are actually just a step-by-step guide to becoming more literate (on opposite day) - and two days before the aforementioned lecture I'd done this 'sexy trick' of mine with 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being'. Looking back however I am almost certain that my instincts weren't terribly far off with the 'he wanted to do me' assumption. Learning recently through the grapevine that he's been having an affair with another lecturer makes me more sure of this. (Life Lesson #38 - the guy willing to fuck someone he works with who isn't his wife is sure as hell willing to fuck an enthusiastic student with big boobs and low self-esteem.) Had I been a little less googly-eyed and panting and a little more aloof I think I could have managed in locking that ass down. As it was, I became so flustered with desire whenever I was within twenty feet of him that I could do little more than try and string together sentences that contained words like 'George Orwell', 'anti-fascist league', and 'social constructivism' in various permutations and order of usage. Then pant and be googly-eyed, then leave. Whenever someone (invariably male) asks me 'did you fuck him?' if the subject of this crush arises in conversation I have to sadly shake my head 'no' and smile wryly because of everything I just said; 'no I did not get to fuck the guy I had a scarily intense crush on, to the point I could barely breathe properly when we were in a room together making me appear like one of those wheezing nerds you see in American movies about college frat houses. Surprisingly'. I still have about four or five books he mentioned in passing that I bought and never read and then lied about reading to him about how much I enjoyed those books and how much they 'opened my mind' (because if you want a boy to like you, you just have to pretend to like the things that he likes! Science) that I do intend to read one day when I can be bothered because the fantasy of us one day running into each other at a conference about special needs/learning disabilities (which I do sometimes have to attend as part of my job and was one of his main research interests so there is a logical thought flow to this idea) and he'll mention Berger & Luckman or Michael Foucault and I'll be able to answer and engage as knowledgeably as I would if he mentioned Lauren Conrad & Heidi Pratt or Robert Pattinson (aka 'things I am actually interested in talking about'). And then he fucks me because, you know. (Or the even better fantasy where I am a successful writer who has completed a series of short stories and essays about identity and am invited back to my alma mater to discuss how brilliant and successful I am and he is so overwhelmed by lust and so impressed by my work that he compliments my brain and then ravishes my body in his office.) (TMI?) NEWAYS. Point is (!), I cringe as well as pant a little whenever I think of him and the rubbishy girly girl loonhead I turned into whenever I was around him.

4. Speaking of which. Myspace; what a charming little invention that was for those of us looking to get laid without leaving our rooms. I had a handful of dalliances thanks to that particular internet revolution and, unlike match.com, all it cost me was my dignity and some of my soul, rather than dignity, my soul, and £14.99 a month. I diligently accepted friends and messaged many a young suitor on that social networking platform. Some worked out (in the short term at least), some didn't, but I had my fingers in a lot of pies for a year or two (so to speak) and it was all in good fun. [Cut to:] One day stood in a Spar shop a boy approached me asking if I was 'Susan'. No, I informed him sadly, I was not. Oh how I wished to be Susan! Fucking bitch gets cute dudes coming up and talking to her in Spar shops! But then, through the internet stalkery lessons I had quickly and naturally acquired as part of the dot.com era, I found the boy on myspace and realised he thought 'Sazz' was in fact 'Susan'! We had had a brief exchange of myspace messages a year or so earlier until I had grown bored because he was four years younger than myself and looked like a total stoner (like I actually had any standards!), and thus it turned out the girl 'Susan' I hated was myself all along! (Many years later a similar breakthrough would occur during therapy but had little to do with myspace and more to do with my relationship with my parents.) By revealing his prior knowledge of me I saw this as an open invitation to become mildly obsessed with him ('mildly obsessed' by my standards is 'restraining order time' by most other people's). I'd look at the conversations he was having with his other myspace friends and was able (who knows to what degree of success) to intimate the sort of relationships he had and was having with other people (girls). I'd look at his photos AND the photos on his friends accounts to try and get a patchwork story to who this guy really was. To try and figure out exactly what he was about. I did all this because... I don't know. Because he called me 'Susan' in a Spar shop one time I guess. That was really all I had to work on, because although online presence can give you the sketch of a person, it doesn't really mean anything IRL and although I found him attractive in the dull light of a Spar shop it wasn't like I thought I'd found my soul mate. He was just a cute guy that was obviously into me enough to recognise my face as the face of a girl he had sent a couple of myspace messages to (the fact that he'd got my name wrong so clearly wasn't that into me didn't figure into this equation). Cute boy + bit of attention = unending devotion. So, anyway, MONTHS later I saw him out when I wasn't very drunk and he was. He screamed my name when he saw me and later kissed me on both cheeks and the nose; 'Do you think he likes me?' I asked my friend as we walked home that night 'fuck off does he like you Sazz you imbecile' she replied (I may be paraphrasing). It's at this point I wish I could hop in my DeLorean, go play 'Johnny B. Goode' onstage and fuck this boy when I was given the chance. He revealed he liked me and I did nothing about it. Fumbly, awkward sex with a teenager (as he was then. But over 18, Mr Policeman!) was just a bold 'well, come on then let's do it' move away and I blew it. Still, my devotion lingered because... Nose kisses! Screaming my name in my face when I entered a club! (Which remains the greatest confidence booster I have ever had.) Surely we just had to be in the same room again and then I could pull my bold move and nab that ass finally? What I forgot to factor in, as well as the fact that what I liked most about him was that he seemed mildly interested in me, was that boys - especially teenage boys - don't have very long attention spans. So days turned into weeks and weeks turned into months and when I ran into him next the tables were turned. This time I was wasted and he less so, he had managed to affect a confident swagger and I had lost the clueless 'huh?' face that I'd greeted him with in our encounters in the past and replaced it with a 'I'm not sure but I think you and I could fall in love one day' vibe. Which was clearly a bit less of a turn-on. I managed to corner him with conversation and then let slip something very small but very telling about the fact that we'd both been to Amsterdam in the past six months; 'How did you know that?' he asked, genuinely mystified. I recoiled in horror and stammered something about needing a wee (as eloquent as ever under pressure) and ran away. Don't think I ever spoke to him again either. I had, however innocently, revealed my internet stalkery as I only knew this because of photos I'd seen, not on his myspace page, but his mates. There's no way I could have known about it without having done some serious internet delving and the weed and alcohol I'd consumed that evening mixed together in such a way that I thought emphasizing our similarities (i.e. getting stoned) was more important than concealing the fact I was an insane person who'd been secretly stalking him for months. I'm not sure what embarrasses me most about that story. Probably all of it.

5. As odd as it sounds for a formally promiscuous heterosexual female to say, for the last year or so I'd sort of forgotten that men can be attractive and just plain nice to look at. Some are tall, some are short, some have beards, some a bit of stubble, some are skinny, some are slightly chubby. Any of these combinations works for me on any given day if they have a glint in their eye and a nice mouth. Now, I'd known this as a conceptual fact for the last year but I was too knee deep in my own abject misery to really understand it as a solid reality. Until now. Now wherever I look I see cutie mctooties all over the show. The lanky barman with greasy 90's grunge hair and a plaid shirt on makes me swoon, the bearded might-be-a-gay shop assistant at HMV with salt and pepper hair (not to be confused with Salt 'n Pepa hair) gets my lust synapses firing on full alert, I keep seeing these boys; men, who I like looking at. I can't imagine that they've been in hiding for the last year which means I must just not have been looking or noticing. Poor loves! Anyway, now I am both looking AND noticing. Sometimes simultaneously! Which I happened to do last night when a douchey looking guy with a We Are Scientists haircut and a pink checked cowboy shirt walked passed my table. All I did was make eye contact and then when he had passed murmured 'very nice' to myself. That's all it was, or all it was supposed to be. Except it wasn't because my friend saw the whole thing. There's me in my own little world, silently appreciating one of God's douchey creatures, and there's my friend watching me make sex eyes at some boy and then mouth 'very nice' once he's walked away. She was staring at me in disbelief as I turned my head and attention back to the group of people I was with. I caught her eye and it dawned on me that she knew what had just gone down and we both suddenly burst into laughter like our lives depended on it, to the extreme consternation of the other people we were sat with who had no clue what a tool I'd just made myself look.

And that was it. I have no idea why it embarrassed me so but it really really did. I think, looking back over these stories what freaks me out is revealing a part of myself that I didn't mean to (indeed quite literally in point one where I inadvertently showed off my ass). What I don't like is getting busted (unlike the band Busted of which I remain extremely fond). So I either accept that I will occasionally show parts of myself that I'd rather keep hidden and just be cool with that or spend all my time neurotically in control of every situation so that I never have to expose myself unwillingly to anyone ever again.

Or just turn these moments into blog posts and let the internet deal with it.

Yeah, let's go with that one.